Dennis Harvey

The film’s brisk progress is always genial and lively, hitting the expected off-color-humor marks without getting too juvenile.

It’s an entertaining flashback to an always-diverting countercultural epoch, with a touching footnote of a semi-famous love story at its center.

Co-produced by the subject's church, this fine feature takes its cue from Malcolm's personality, treating material in a refreshingly earnest, straightforward terms sans flash or preachiness.

This is a well-cast, artfully handled effort that exercises sufficient restraint to really earn its requisite laughter and tears.

The film’s edge, if not its worthiness, is slightly dulled by an over-slick approach that in the end makes it feel less like reportage than a first-class fundraising video.

One of the more bizarre illustrations of racial injustice under apartheid is dramatized in Skin.

This solid little thriller does a good job balancing character drama and suspense elements, its smooth craftsmanship belying the creator’s newbie status in multiple creative roles.

You’re Next is fairly light on psychological and narrative complexity, but it’s still a good cut above the slasher norm, with a firm grasp on visceral action and the wisdom to place tongue slightly in cheek when things go further over the top.

A pleasant surprise...more directorial personality here than most "SNL"-derived features get...the cheerily absurd, color-saturated atmosphere recalls John Waters' "Hairspray."

The complex tonal, textural and thematic mix here doesn’t always work, but it’s always interesting and often invigorating.

The modest pic’s laughs get bigger as it goes along, and so does its surprising warmth.

For all its tastefully exasperating gaps in character and storytelling specifics, “To Live & Die and Live” still has a persuasive overall vision, one that holds out the possibility of salvation for its hero — and its city — albeit only if history and the toll it still exacts are faced head-on.

It’s a film more gritty than stylish, but in any case with all key contributions lashed to the service of a tricky narrative with scant gratuitous fat or flamboyance.

A winning look at cross-cultural romance.

Some fans will find the approach (which avoids Nirvana music and perf footage) too arty and indirect; but others will welcome the specialized theatrical release and the subsequent DVD.

Eden Lake doesn't feel like torture porn so much as a rural-jeopardy thriller in extremis.

This atypical serial-killer thriller distinguishes itself in resisting thrills — let alone any actual violence — till well past its halfway point, instead maximizing the quiet discomfort in a son’s rising suspicion that his outwardly Dagwood-type dad could be a notorious murderer.

Antic horror comedy I Sell the Dead nods to the '60s Hammer heyday of fog-swirling Victorian chillers, as well as that period's penchant for teaming genre favorites (Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, etc.) in genial sendups.

While the black-white-and-red-clad duo's mystique survives intact, there's some backstage insight.

Exuberantly silly, Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings sends up Filipino horror, romance, gaysploitation and other genre cliches in service of a pro-tolerance message.

Delivers the essential suspense goods with overall skill and a modicum of intelligence.

Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman is designed to go down easy among exactly the audiences who might assume all environmentalists are “radicals,” but would readily identify with the folksy protagonists herein.

Sharply observed but lacking in the probing psychological insights of Silva’s best movies, Tyrel is a chamber piece whose rhythms feel entirely natural (it’s shot in cast member Arze’s house), but which doesn’t resonate greatly after the fadeout.

Mixes satisfying dollops of fun, tears, travel, romance and lesson-learning in a handsome package whose two hours pass faster than many a grownup entertainment.

The pleasant, polished drama provides a compassionate take on a high schooler undergoing considerable change, its only debit being the arguably too-neat depiction of that transitional circumstance.

While the crimes were appalling, one leaves Little Hope Was Arson less concerned with them — especially as all the churches have since been rebuilt — than with larger questions of forgiveness.

Stays consistently interesting through some risky tonal shifts.

Picture is a colorful human mosaic.